This week we began our project, designing, making and evaluating a small cushion with a pocket for putting teeth into for collection by the Tooth Fairy! Half of the class worked with Mrs Love and began sewing their first few layers together and the other half worked with Miss Tokley to tie dye the other layer in our cushion with some fantastic results! Next week we will swap and continue to document our process.

Year 3 were overjoyed to hear that our KS2 production is Mary Poppins! They are very excited to begin rehearsals soon! 

Wow year 3! You have all been amazing at completing all of your weekly reads recently! A big thank you to your families and friends for helping with this.

In Science we have been looking at plants and how plants take in water. We added food colouring or felt tip pen ink to water to see how the process works and how quickly we could see results. Some members of the class chose to focus on comparing the two dye types, others focused on if the height of the flower made a difference to the speed the petals received water and some looked at a flower split in two to see if we could make a multicoloured flower! We checked on our plants daily and recorded our observations. We were surprised to see that the colour of the flowers was actually brighter for the felt tip ink, particularly the blue!

A fantastic day was had by all visiting Colchester Zoo to learn more about our Rainforests topic and to meet some of the animals up close! Our guide was amazed by the amount of the knowledge that the children already had and we even treated her to a performance of our rainforest song! Some of the class' favourite parts included getting to hold stick insects and cockroaches, feeding the elephants and giraffes and learning about the toilet habits of sloths! A big thank you to Mr Biner for joining us on our trip.

Year 3 designed, prepared and made a healthy soup this week and were delighted when they discovered it contained all of our 5 a day! They learnt how to peel and chop safely and with the help of Matthew Magpie were able to cook it over a fire in the beautiful woodland before having a taste test. Some of us loved it, some were not so keen!

I was so proud of year 3 on their recent trip to Chelmsford Museum to end our topic of 'from stone age to iron age'. They demonstrated their knowledge with great enthusiasm and were wonderfully behaved throughout. We had the opportunity to take part in great activities such as cave painting, soap knapping and even got to spin our own wool!

We had a great time on the life bus last week with Nancy and Harold the Giraffe! We learnt all about the brain and even got to see inside our bodies to see how everything works! Everyone participated well and engaged in some in depth discussions about whether things were helpful or harmful. We discovered that even some things that we thought were helpful such as medicine could be harmful if misused. 

We have been doing lots of outdoor learning in our first half term, including using natural diennes to demonstrate place value and making our own 'rounding hills' to help us know whether to round up or down!

We have also had a go at making our own Stone Age instruments, using natural objects to produce different sounds.